As a blogger, you surely want to notify as many services as possible when you update or write a post. That’s why most of us just add one after another ping service url in the Update Services list in WordPress. The list gets huge & we sometimes even forget to care if a ping service is mentioned twice. Then the problem comes. Some servers keep track of the pings & if they find duplicate pings immediately without any time interval, they may take it as a attack of spammer. As a result they might ban your blog for future pings. [...]
As a blogger, I am sure that you are concerned about potential hackers & spammers. Today I am going to tell you about a WordPress security threat that you may not have thought about. Most of us like to try different templates especially on the new blogs. There are tons of free WordPress themes gallery sites around. And you will fall for them surely to try & find out a suitable one for your blog. But are these sites reliable? You can’t say yes for all of them. Now here comes the trick. When these theme galleries collect WordPress themes from the respective authors, they can easily put malicious codes on the theme files before showing them in their sites. These codes can be spam related promoting third party sites or even can be used to hack your blog. You would keep blogging & never notice that someone is taking unwanted advantage of you. [...]
Do you use internal linking in your blog extensively? Then you may find self pinging quite annoying. By default, WordPress will send a pingback each time you link to your post. And it can generate tons of self pings if you link to your previous posts every now & then. It looks clumsy . And only a few self pings would really matter to the old post, as they may give an updated info about the old one. But if you are using a related posts plugin, then you don’t need to worry about showing related info. You then just want to stop self ping. [...]
Do you have an open blog? Then you know the importance of creating a blogging community for your blog so that contributors come & write regularly. One way to do this is to increase interaction among the members. If they can interact directly with each other from your blog, then they can use it as a platform to meet fellow bloggers with same interest & communicate for views on their own blogs or link exchange. That means more visit from your members. Besides c0-authors can communicate better to find what topics to write to make the posts coherent in your blog. [...]
This is a blog about blogging. I blog on WordPress. But I didn’t say a word about WordPress 2.8! Why? Simply because I don’t have enough time to explore the new features by experimenting with it. I haven’t upgraded yet. And there is no point writing on something what I don’t know pretty well. I am too busy going through my training. By the way, I have never mentioned it, I am a software professional. [...]
WordPress by default is not protected from Brute Force or Dictionary attacks. It is because there is no limit how many times a user can try invalid passwords before finding the correct one. So a Brute Force attacker can easily launch successive login requests with large pool of words. I was doing a bit of search to find a solution to it. As usual, WordPress plugins came to my rescue. And interestingly, I have found a few plugins that can do the work for you, but using a bit of different mechanism. [...]
Are you a big fan of Twitter? Do you like to add a group-messaging system in your blog? WordPress can help you with that. Just install P2 WordPress theme. And it will transform traditional blogging to a multi-user conversation system automatically. Look at the demo blog. It almost looks like a Twitter update page. I would rather say a Twitter without a dashboard because you seldom have to go there. Almost everything can be maintained from front page. You can post updates or reply directly from front page. Even there is option for inline editing for posts & comments. [...]
Sometimes when you comment on a WordPress blog you get a reply email from the blog author thanking you for your input. As a first time visitor it catches the eye of the reader. It shows that the blog author is taking care of his readers. And if the blog consists a bit of quality content, there is every possibility that the reader will subscribe to it. Thus increase your blog community. [...]
Would you like to add a Yellow Pages like directory to your WordPress blog? Then you can use a simple plugin from Business Directory for WordPress. Install & activate it. Create a few pages. Add a few snippets of code there. You are done. Let your readers or advertisers use it to submit an advertising on your blog. Or you can use it for your link building purpose.
I am talking about a very popular theme. It’s UDB Moneymaker theme. Perhaps you have seen it in other blogs if not yours as thousands of bloggers use it. It’s a great theme no doubt. But do you know one thing? You can remove the credit link from the footer if you wish. Most of us don’t like to show it. Here is what it says in Usage Agreement: [...]